Richard Clifford Diebenkorn was an American painter. He was a founding member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, along with David Park and Elmer Bischoff.
Background
Richard Diebenkorn was born on April 22, 1922 in Portland, Multnomah County, Oregon, United States. He was the son of Richard Clifford Diebenkorn and Dorothy (Stephens) Diebenkorn. When he was two years old his father, who was a hotel supply sales executive, relocated the family to San Francisco.
Education
Richard Diebenkorn attended Lowell High School from 1937 – 1940, and entered Stanford University in 1940. There he concentrated in studio art and art history, studying under Victor Arnautoff and Daniel Mendelowitz. Mendelowitz also took his promising student to visit the home of Sarah Stein, sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein, where he saw works by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
In 1949, he was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University. In 1950 Diebenkorn enrolled at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree a year later.
Richard Diebenkorn served in the United States Marine Corps from 1943 until 1945. While stationed in Quantico, Virginia, he visited a number of important collections of modern art, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Gallatin Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. He internalized influences from Cézanne, Julio González, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Mark Rothko and Kurt Schwitters; some paintings, such as Matisse’s 1916 Studio, Quai St. Michel at the Phillips Collection were especially particular for him. During this time he produced representational sketches that he would continue to work on when he was stationed in Southern California and in Hawaii, and that constitute his "wartime" work.
Returning from military duty to San Francisco in 1946, Diebenkorn took advantage of the G.I. bill to study at the California School of Fine Arts. There he met many serious contemporaries who would remain his friends and artistic colleagues, and an older one, David Park, who would have an especially important influence on him. In 1946 he received the Albert Bender Grant-in-Aid fellowship, allowing him to spend nearly a year in Woodstock, New York, in an environment where serious abstract artists found their ways. In New York City, he had his first contact with William Baziotes and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Diebenkorn’s relatively small canvases of this period were influenced by them, as well as by Picasso.
In 1947 he moved to Sausalito (north of San Francisco) and began teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco Art Institute) in San Francisco. He met the California modernist artists David Park and Elmer Bischoff, who were instructors at the school, and with whom he would be closely associated during his figurative period, beginning in 1956.
In 1951 he taught for a year at the University of Illinois at Urbana. In 1953 he met the abstract expressionist Franz Kline. From January 1955 until June 1960 he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts and from the fall of 1961 until 1966 at the San Francisco Art Institute. He was also a guest of the Soviet Artists Congress and was able to see the Henri Matisse collection at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
In 1966, he and his wife moved from Berkeley to Santa Monica, where Diebenkorn accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles. Within several months of beginning work in his first Santa Monica studio, located in a neighborhood near the beach known as Ocean Park, the artist embarked on the great cycle of paintings and drawings, the "Ocean Park period." In doing so, he definitively ended his figurative approach, to invent a unique abstract language he would develop until 1988. In 1971, he had his first exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in New York; these three shows became much-anticipated opportunities to observe the unfolding of the Ocean Park vocabulary.
In 1977, he moved to New York’s M. Knoedler & Co., Inc, where, over the course of the next decade he exhibited nearly annually. This would become a series of events perhaps even more appreciated than his earlier Ocean Park shows at Marlborough. With the widely noticed traveling exhibition organized by the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1976, his national reputation as both a figurative and abstract artist, became secure.
In 1980 and 1981, Diebenkorn temporarily changed direction, producing a rather eccentric group of works on paper known as the "Clubs and Spades" drawings. In late 1988, and continuing as a traveling exhibition throughout 1989, Diebenkorn’s works on paper were organized into a major show and book by the Museum of Modern Art’s curator John Elderfield. This was a landmark event for the artist and his public, including, as it did, the entire range of his stylistic journey right through the late 1980s.
In the spring of 1988, Richard and Phyllis Diebenkorn moved from Santa Monica to Healdsburg, California, to a rural home near the Russian River, overlooking vineyards and scrub-oak hillsides. In late 1992, the Diebenkorns were forced to take up residence at their Berkeley apartment in order to be nearer to medical treatment.
Quotations:
"I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue."
"My father didn't think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man. He hoped I would see my way to more serious work and would find myself turning towards medicine, law, or business. "
"All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression."
"I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops."
"My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1967
National Council on the Arts
1966 - 1969
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1982
Interests
Artists
Edward Hopper
Connections
On June 16, 1943 Richard Diebenkorn married Phyllis Antoinette Gilman. They had two children - a daughter, Gretchen (1945), and a son, Christopher (1947).
Father:
Richard Clifford Diebenkorn
Mother:
Dorothy Diebenkorn
Spouse:
Phyllis Antoinette Gilman
Son:
Christopher Diebenkorn
Daughter:
Gretchen Gilman Diebenkorn
teacher:
Victor Arnautoff
teacher:
David Mendelowitz
References
Richard Diebenkorn
This volume contains a biographical introduction by Sarah C. Bancroft, an essay on Diebenkorn’s influences by Steven Nash, and an essay on Diebenkorn’s works on paper by Edith Devaney. Together these bring the artist’s rich, four-decade-long career into focus. The book covers Diebenkorn’s three distinct periods, which saw him gain recognition as a leading Abstract Expressionist in the early 1950s, then turn to figurative painting, before embarkin
2015
Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné
This four-volume catalogue raisonné is the definitive resource on Diebenkorn’s unique works, including his paintings, works on paper, and three-dimensional objects.
The Art of Richard Diebenkorn
Jane Livingston's extensively researched biographical essay covers Diebenkorn's entire career and concentrates on the artist's inner life and purposes as revealed in his paintings.
1997
Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966
This book examines Diebenkorn’s process and output during this decisive period. Three original essays explore the artist’s evolving conceptions of abstraction and representation, emphasizing the interrelationships between the abstract paintings and drawings and related landscapes, figurative works, and still lifes, as well as Diebenkorn’s ongoing interest in aerial views.